Journals

Alum Art

April 12, 2008 This past weekend two alums from the class of '07 came for a reunion concert of their band, Sponge Fingers. While the show was broken up by an unfortunate fire alarm (unrelated), other events played out a 2-D drama on my walls. Missing in action for a period of hours, I returned to my room to discover a gallery's worth of sketches on my walls. Alumni guests had stripped flyers (kept up to remind us of our triumphs), stolen paper reserved for my movie project, and torn down those fliers beloved of our refrigerator, all in order to create their own art. Streamers hung from the roof, bizarre, vaguely Buddhist sketches of amalgamated lifeforms sprouted on our doors, and the unquestionable stench of creativity lingered in my room. They had been and created.

Most telling was the presence of a brand-new, stolen red paper, portrait series. All of the major figures of my life, sketched in broad-eyed depictions that defied any conventional sense of portraiture, yet captured some semblance of true-to-life nevertheless. I found Ali and Chris's portraits suitably convincing, while Will, my roommate, who has recently been addressed by his new nick-name, Clown-Hands, has a reasonably accurate depiction displayed over his own doorway. Of course, being Hamilton alums, they have their own bizarre, yet professional, outlook on contemporary life, delivering one portrait, of Alex, a friend abroad, as a soaring Pterodactyl. I may not understand the drawing, but I like its place on my wall.

Now we have a brand new gallery of fine art. May each picture stay taped on our wall forever, as a reminder to subsequent generations of the bizarre cavemen who once inhabited the Keehn Faculty Apartment.